The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [79]
Now that he was the emir of the Arabs, bin Laden held himself above the riotous competition for recruits among the rival Islamic groups that were elbowing each other at the airport as they hustled the newcomers onto their buses. The wrangling was especially nasty among the Egyptians. The two main Egyptian organizations—the Islamic Group, led by Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, and Zawahiri’s al-Jihad—set up competing guesthouses, and they began publishing magazines and broadsides with little purpose other than to vilify each other. Among the accusations made by the Islamic Group against Zawahiri were that he had sold arms for gold, which he deposited in a Swiss bank account, and that he was an agent for the Americans—the universal charge of treason. In turn, Zawahiri wrote a tract attacking Sheikh Omar titled “The Blind Leader,” in which he recapitulated their prison quarrels for control of the radical Islamist movement. The unstated cause of these slanderous salvos was the question of who was going to control bin Laden, the golden Saudi goose. Bin Laden made his preference known by awarding $100,000 to al-Jihad to begin its operations.
Meantime, a new battle was taking shape in Jalalabad, the strategic entry point on the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass, where all the roads and valleys and footpaths converged. The adversary was no longer the Soviet superpower. Now it was the communist Afghan government, which refused to collapse as so many had predicted. (One of the ugly ironies of the Arab Afghan crusade is that it was made up, by a large majority, of Muslims who came to fight Muslims, not Soviet invaders.) The siege of Jalalabad was supposed to close the curtain on communist rule in Afghanistan. Emboldened by the Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen had contemptuously decided to mount a frontal assault on the Afghan position. The city, which stood behind a river and a wide corridor of Russian mines, was defended by thousands of Afghan government troops, who were demoralized by the articles in the Pakistani press of the impending mujahideen attack and the inevitable rapid victory that was supposed to follow.
The initial assault came in March 1989, with five to seven thousand Afghan mujahideen charging down Highway 1. Eight different commanders led the men, not counting the Arabs, who followed bin Laden. After overrunning the airport on the outskirts of town, the mujahideen fell back against a powerful counterattack; then matters settled into an unexpected stalemate, with the various mujahideen commanders involved in the siege refusing to coordinate with one another.
Bin Laden and his military staff occupied a small cave in the mountains, four kilometers above the city. He had fewer than two hundred men under his command. Once again, he was ill.
His biographer, Essam Deraz, arrived, bringing with him a supply of vitamins and twelve boxes of Arcalion, a drug bin Laden always requested. He told Deraz that it was to help with his concentration. Arcalion is normally prescribed for a marked decrease in muscle strength or stamina, which might be caused by vitamin deficiencies or lead poisoning, among other things. Bin Laden’s health, which had been so robust when he was a desert youth, had endured several blows in the harsh mountain environs. Like many of the men, he had contracted malaria; then in the severe winter of 1988–89, he nearly died of pneumonia when an intense snowfall buried him and several companions in their vehicle for a few days. The prolonged and unanticipated siege of Jalalabad taxed his weakened constitution further, and he was nagged increasingly by puzzling spells of back pain and paralyzing fatigue.
Zawahiri, who had developed a reputation among the Arab fighters as being a medical genius, drove over from Peshawar two or three times a week to treat the injured. His main patient, of course, was bin Laden, who needed intravenous glucose treatments to keep from fainting. Bin Laden would lie for hours on the floor of the cave, in pain and unable to move. The diagnosis was low blood pressure, which is usually a symptom